He glared at me. “You’re not like how I remember. You were fat.”
“I was fat? You sure you know what fat looks like?”
He paused his game and twisted around to face me. “You were, like, a fat goth chick or something.”
“People change. Anyway, I was sleeping. Maybe turn down the volume or read a book. Quiet kid things.”
Tomi rose from the cushion. I watched him walk to the kitchen in mismatched socks and oversize pipe shorts. He grabbed a carton of Sunny Delight from the fridge. He poured a glass, got himself some Gushers from the pantry, and returned to his seat. He unpaused his game and blew up a helicopter.
“You shouldn’t be sleeping at three in the afternoon,” he said. “Only bums do that.”
* * *
—
The next morning, I called my parole officer from Manny’s house phone. She was an older woman from Nebraska named Charlie Mae and spoke with a slight lisp.
“Now, Nicole, you need to start making some job contacts.”
“I’ve been home a day.”
“That’s no excuse. It’s already noon.”
“I’m not qualified for much.”
“Sure you are,” she said. “Find your niche. That thing you like.”
At La Vista, I had taken enrichment classes. Some lady from the community college taught us how to make traditional Pueblo Indian pinch pots. Another woman visited with notebooks filled with nature sketches and tracings of dead birds. The class I liked most, though, was Language Arts. We read Lilies of the Field and I had this clear picture of a little desert town. I liked going there, so I read the book more than once. I also loved biographies, especially about women inventors, like Bette Graham, who came up with white-out. I thought maybe I could do something like that—come up with my own inventions, but after I got out, I knew no one would have enough faith in me.
That afternoon I walked three blocks to Thirty-second Avenue. Blond women with high ponytails pushed babies in expensive strollers while white guys in khakis stared at their cellphones, sidestepping fallen leaves. I went into a tea shop that had once been a liquor store and handed the frizzy-haired redhead my résumé. She wore beaded earrings and colorful New Age crystals around her neck.
“You have experience with teas?” she asked, her eyes looking out from delicate, wire-framed glasses.
“Oh yes,” I said. “I can steep the shit out of a tea bag.”
She stared at me and cleared her throat. “We’re not hiring.”
I was back at Manny’s, sitting in front of the empty fireplace, drinking a cup of chamomile tea in place of beer, when Tomi came home. Without noticing me, he stepped into the kitchen wearing earbuds. He opened the refrigerator, grabbed the Sunny Delight, tipped his head back, and guzzled.
I gently yanked his earbuds. “Shouldn’t you be at school?”
He wiped his juice mustache on the back of his hand. “Shouldn’t you be out getting a job?”
“For your information, I was out looking for jobs earlier.” I grabbed the bottle of Sunny Delight. “This is gross. You know how many calories this has? Your dad shouldn’t buy this. It’s sugar water.”
“Whatever. You should know. You used to be a fat goth cokehead.”
I opened my mouth and lowered my eyebrows, pretending to be offended. Tomi didn’t flinch. His little freckled moon face remained fixed in an angry scowl.
I flicked his backpack strap and flung my index finger into the air.
“Let’s get something straight, Tomás Manuel Morales. One, I was not goth. I just liked purple lip liner. Two, I wasn’t that fat. And three, I wasn’t a cokehead. If I was, I would have been skinny. Everybody knows that.”
Tomi scrunched his face. A deep line formed between his eyebrows.
“Are you going to make me go back to school?”
* * *
—
“Do you think he plays videogames too much?” I asked Manny as he dug through the hallway closet, searching for a set of sheets. After tossing into the corner several pillow covers that our mother had crocheted, he stepped away from the shelves. There was a dusty cinnamon smell like our mother’s hair, though it must have been a memory, something tricking my mind.
“Christ almighty,” Manny said, his face hidden by the bill of a Rockies hat, the slight shadow spreading down his flannel shirt like a bib.
It was Saturday. That meant working around the house for Manny and nothing else. He removed his hat. He wiped sweat with his shirtsleeve from his forehead. He muttered something about Natalie taking the pillows and God knows what else. He then placed his hands on his lower back, letting out a groan.
“Tomi is dealing with a lot right now. If it makes him happy to play some videogames, I’m not going to take away his happiness. Let the boy be.”
“Does she even see him?” I asked.
Manny rubbed the stubble on his neck. He walked across the hallway until he stood beneath the attic door, unlooping its roped latch from its resting place. “No.”
“Honestly, I never liked Natalie. She’s a selfish bitch.” The truth was, in the beginning, I wanted to like her, I wanted her to be the sister I never had. But Natalie scared me. It wasn’t unusual for her to fight when we were younger. She once shattered a dish across Manny’s face when he’d embarrassed her at a cousin’s birthday party.
Manny pried open the attic. There was a cool and anxious draft. “Don’t call my son’s mother a bitch.”
“Some mother,” I said, gathering the pillow covers from the floor and placing them back in the closet. That’s when I caught sight of Manny’s bedroom down the hallway, the door halfway open revealing his unmade pillowless bed. It was strange not having Natalie in the house. I once saw her on the edge of that bed, crying with strands of her black ponytail caught in her mouth. “You think this is what I want, Cole?” she had asked when our eyes met. She was eight months pregnant with Tomi and as she walked out of my sight, she resembled a little girl with a balloon tucked underneath her shirt, playing pretend.
“I mean it about Tomi,” I said after some time. “It isn’t right for a kid to sit inside all day. He should be out building a fort or finding dead bodies in the woods. You know, like in Stand by Me.”
Manny started up the wooden ladder, his torso disappearing into the skull of the house. “Worry about getting yourself a job.”
* * *
—
Tomi was on the sofa cushion, clicking the remote and staring at the blank TV screen. I sat on a recliner pretending not to notice anything unusual. While he was at school, I had unplugged some cables from the wall. I hid them behind the elliptical in the basement, the one place he’d never look.
Tomi walked to the TV, pushed some more buttons, and said, “Where are they?”
“I heard your mom jacked the pillows. Why don’t you ask her ass?”
Tomi looked defeated. He slumped forward and stared at his mismatched socks, wiggling a toe through a tiny hole. He wore a black T-shirt with flames and traced his plump index finger over the printed fire. “She’s such a bad person.”
“All moms are crazy,” I told him. “I was about to go to the bookstore. Come with me?”
Tomi twisted his face while tapping his socked foot against the carpet. He threw his head around and rolled his eyes beneath his glasses.
“Don’t start convulsing,” I said.
“Whatever.”
“Do you want to go to the bookstore or not?”
“I can’t believe you like to read,” said Tomi.
“I was in prison. What do you think I did all day?”
* * *
—
Tomi walked like a little boy lost in a world of wonder. I was stunned by how, at the edge of a pond, he reached up and gently held the dying leaf of a tree. It had rained earlier. Clear b
eads of moisture clung to the branch. He snapped the leaf from its stem. Leftover water pelted our heads as Tomi threw the leaf to the sidewalk, crushing it with his enormous padded tennis shoes.
“Did your mom ever take you on walks?” I asked.
“We used to,” Tomi said. “We’d go with Dad in the summer, before the sun went down.”
“I used to walk with my mom, too.”
“Grandma Louise?”
I nodded. “Did your dad tell you about her?”
“Yup. He said she made really pretty blankets.”
I smiled. I told Tomi that was true.
“Hey, Cole, which room was yours growing up? Was it mine or the other one, the big room with the bathroom connected?”
He was talking about the master bedroom, where my father had collapsed in the shower. It’s also where my mother fell asleep when I was eight years old and never woke up. No one stayed in that room anymore. There were too many ghosts. Manny used the room as storage, filled it with Christmas decorations, Tomi’s old baby bassinet, seasonal junk.
“I had your room,” I said. “Watch out, there might be goth crap hidden in the floorboards.”
Tomi snickered. “Our room sucks. The big tree in the front yard blocks my view of everything.”
“It’s not too bad.” I thought of how I used to climb down from my window and onto that cottonwood tree as a teenager, bottles of stolen tequila and a few stray beers in my backpack. My getaway tree.
Tomi strolled ahead, his jeans making jingling noises, as if he were a janitor carrying around keys to a thousand rooms. “It’s the worst. When my mom left, I couldn’t see her at all. I could hear her car and all that, but I couldn’t see anything but those stupid leaves.”
“Where’s your mom now?”
“She’s with her new boyfriend, Ronald. She tried to take me over there, but I hated it. He smells like a ferret and he’s really into Frisbee golf.”
“That’s really weird.”
“It is really fucking weird.”
“Watch it.” I lightly slapped the back of his head. “Don’t cuss.”
At the bookstore, I showed Tomi the teen section, an overflowing back corner with a dirty love seat. There were posters on the walls of nineties celebrities posing with copies of Beloved and Moby-Dick.
“See,” I told him. “Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer likes to read.”
When he asked who that was, I said never mind and told him to pick out a book. I walked to the entrance and thought of asking the clerk for an application, but I knew this wasn’t the sort of place where they’d hire an ex-convict.
After a little while, Tomi tapped my shoulder and presented me with a book. The cover image was of an exceptionally suntanned warrior descending a volcano as he thrust the bloody heart of a sacrificial victim into the air. Behind him, a bolt of white lightning illuminated the title, Azteca Moonrise. “It’s a whole series,” Tomi whispered. “How many can I get?”
I was released from prison with two hundred bucks and some change.
“How about you get Book One. If you like it, we’ll come back for the second.”
“Nice. These books look badass.” Tomi sent the pages fluttering with his thumb. “Hey, Cole. I’m not retarded or anything.”
“I never said you were.”
“I know, but sometimes I get mixed up on words. My mom used to help, but she’s busy playing Frisbee golf now.”
“That sucks. You want my help?”
The next day after school, Tomi sat beside me at the kitchen table, his fleshy arms folded beneath his chin, Azteca Moonrise in front of us. We stayed for an hour, our necks bent over the pages aching from marathon reading and sleeping without pillows. Tomi, I discovered, was a slow reader, to the point that it worried me. Over the next few days I researched reading strategies online. Visualization. Annotating. We tried them out and within a couple weeks, Tomi actually showed improvement. He especially loved reading aloud. Whenever he got to a passage with a warrior sacrificing a virgin, Tomi passed the book to me.
“I like how you do the voices,” he’d say, and I always thanked him, reminding him that I played Rudolph in the La Vista Christmas pageant, two years running.
* * *
—
A few weeks after Tomi and I started reading Azteca Moonrise, Manny came home with a paper grocery sack and two shot glasses. He sat at the kitchen table and let out a drafty sigh. I curled my arm around the sofa’s back to face him. From the paper sack, he pulled out a bottle of Hornitos and set it on the table with a clink. Manny twirled the bottle by its long neck, smirked. “Got a sales bonus today. Five hundred bones.”
“Congratulations. Now get that shit out of here.”
“What are the chances your PO will show?”
I glared at Manny. “As good a chance as any other night. Take it out to your truck.”
I reminded him that as part of my early release, Charlie Mae could visit whenever she pleased. I could hear her voice saying, No alcohol or other forms of contraband allowed in the domicile. I could go back to La Vista for a thimble of marshmallow-flavored vodka.
Manny moved his hand around the tequila’s top, as though he were unscrewing its cap. With the bottle still sealed, he poured imaginary shots. He licked the back of his left hand, dashed out some salt. “Arriba, abajo.”
“You’re crazy,” I said and joined him at the table.
The bonus had nothing to do with Manny’s desire to drink real or imagined liquor. He was in a wistful mood, reminiscing, talking about our parents and telling stories from back in the day. “You were so damn scared,” he kept saying about the time I fell from the cottonwood tree that my father had warned us against. One wrong move and you kids will break your necks. Manny had rushed barefoot into the front yard, slicing open his heel on a broken bottle someone had tossed onto our lawn. As he carried me inside, he left bloody footprints on the hardwood floor. I looked over his shoulder at the shining red pools. “Is it my neck?” I asked. “No,” he said. “It’s mine.”
“I’m worried about Tomi,” I told Manny after some time. “I think he has a problem. A reading problem.”
“He’s eleven and doesn’t like to read. It’s normal.”
“Ten,” I said.
“What?”
“Ten. Tomi is ten.”
I studied Manny’s face and wondered if he resembled our father at that age. Long lines trailed from the sides of his nose down to the edges of his mouth. His dark eyes were bright, though heavy with bags. At La Vista, I often pictured Manny as a little boy, his grave face and stern eyes, but he was never a child to me, always the big brother, always the grown-up.
“Why didn’t you visit me?” I said.
Manny dropped his gaze to his lap. “Natalie didn’t want to go. Said it wouldn’t be good for Tomi.”
“I needed you,” I said softly.
“I didn’t want to see you in a place like that. What do you want me to say?”
“That you’re sorry.”
Manny shook his head and poured another make-believe shot. He raised it to me. “I swear on our parents’ lives, if you ever drive a stolen vehicle while under the influence into a residential building again, I will visit you in prison.”
I swallowed, attempting to calm my trembling throat. “Shut up, asshole.”
* * *
—
Tomi and I finished Azteca Moonrise on a Wednesday afternoon. We read the final page out loud together, and after the last line, Tomi looked at me, almost tearful, and said, “Azteca Starship awaits.” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Let’s go to the bookstore right now.” I didn’t have any cash left, and while I thought to ask Manny for help, I knew he’d just tell me to get a job.
“Let’s try the library? We can take the bus. Every ride is an advent
ure.”
“Yeah,” Tomi said. “For poor people.”
“Well, I’m poor. And you’re ten. That makes you poor by default.”
The bus drove through a part of downtown where new metallic apartments jutted into the skyline, mimicking the view of the mountains. Traffic swarmed and coughed under the city’s haze and healthy looking young people rode bikes through the streets, past the homeless who curled under wilted cardboard. Tomi sat beside me, looking out the window. As we neared the library, he leaned over me like a puppy about to pee.
“See that house?” he asked, pointing enthusiastically at a newly remodeled bungalow. “I think that’s Ronald’s house. Where my mom lives now.”
I stared at the house, trying to imagine Natalie in a home like that. It didn’t seem plausible. It had a clean, square lawn and in place of an ancient cottonwood, infant trees were held upright with tiny ropes. The house even had a three-car garage and a basketball hoop beneath an American flag. “I don’t think she lives there,” I said. “Your mom wouldn’t like a home like that.” But as the bus rounded the corner, Natalie’s Honda pulled into the driveway and we both grew quiet.
At the central library, a security guard beneath a string of enormous Colorado flags greeted us. The wide space was cool with marble floors. Tomi flicked my purse strap as I searched the database for Azteca Starship. We learned from the back of Book One that this volume included a sacrifice in space. We both had many questions, like where does blood spurt in zero gravity and are jaguar teeth and obsidian spikes still the preferred weapons? I wrote the author’s name on a white square of paper and told Tomi to follow me. We zigzagged in and out of aisles, our chins tilted upward until we eventually stood before our shelf, the whole of the Azteca Intergalactic Series before us.
“I don’t understand,” I said, looking at my paper. “It should be right here.”
Tomi jumped to see higher. “It’s not?”
“No, it’s missing.”
“This sucks,” said Tomi. “Of course it’s gone.” He kicked the shelf, his puffy shoe sliding off, exposing his white sock. His dark eyes were fixed on a certain point and it appeared he was searching the bookshelf behind me, but he wasn’t.
Sabrina & Corina Page 14